Monitors, Gaming Laptops, Motherboards That Do It In The Back, And More
MSI released a number of new products at CES 2025, including the MSI MPG 272URX QD-OLED gaming monitor, which is a CES 2025 Innovation Awards Honoree. The disappointingly short model name is overshadowed by the specs, a 27″ 4K 240Hz QD-OLED which connects via DP 2.1a. The panel is brand new, a 5-layer tandem OLED panel featuring EL Gen 3 technology which improves efficiency and the longevity of the brightness of the display.
If that’s not impressive enough for you, how about the MSI MPG 272QR QD-OLED X50 which sports a peak refresh rate of 500Hz at QHD? We’re not sure exactly what you could connect to the other side of the DP 2.1a cable, but you will certainly be future proofed against the next generations of GPU. The insane refresh rate is not all, it is a VESA Certified DisplayHDR True Black 500 display and also boasts MSI’s ClearMR 21000 to give you AI powered motion clarity.
For the mobile gamer MSI updated their Raider, Vector, and Stealth series of laptops to include NVIDIA RTX 5xxx GPUs and your choice of a Core Ultra 200HX Series or Ryzen 9000 HX and a 260W of performance; perhaps they refer to the cooling being able to maintain high frequencies? There is also the new Venture and VenturePro series they hope to tempt businesses with. They come in a wide variety of AMD and Intel powered flavours, with the option to add a discrete GPU to assist in any programs you have that they can accelerate. They are heftier than the gaming options, as cooling is prioritized and the battery is heftier as these laptops are expected to put in a full day of work.
Last of the laptops is the MSI Titan 18 HX Dragon Edition Norse Myth which sports hand drawn artwork and Nordic runes inside and outside to make your laptop really stand out in the crowd. They will be powered by a GeForce RTX 50 series mobile GPU, and Core Ultra 200HX series processors which may discourage some from picking up an otherwise beautiful laptop. MSI also had fun with the storage, including their Super RAID 5 technology, which can combine Gen5 and Gen4 SSDs into a RAID in an effective manner.
We’ve heard tell of MSI’s Project Zero X before, which pairs cases and motherboards specifically designed with the power connections on the back, to make a clean looking build to show off to your friends. The cases will have not three, but four glass sides, letting you show off every aspect of your system. Your ATX and 12V connectors, fan and radiator power and even the SATA ports are all migrated to the back, where the cables can be gathered in a loom instead of looking like spaghetti. It might be time to look at some of those fancy third party cables you can get, if people are going to be looking at your wiring job.
project zero x
project zero x mobo
The last is something which is hopefully better than it’s predecessor, the MSI Claw 8 AI+ Gaming Handheld. Their first handheld was not well received, costing more than the competitors options, while simultaneously being outperformed by them. The new generation will use Intel’s second series of Core Ultra processors, which is an intelligent use for them and could help the new Claw 8 AI+ garner more positive attention, especially when paired with an Arc 140V GPU.
It runs Windows 11 Home, so you will have a lot of options when it comes to where you get your games from, and 32GB of LPDDR5x-8533 should feed it enough that the OS will behave. The storage is on a single Gen4 PCIe NVMe drive, with a Micro SD card reader and two Thunderbolt 4 for display and power delivery. MSI also updated the sticks, bumpers, D-pad, and the hall-effect triggers, so it may also feel much better in your hands. We await the reviews to see how well MSI did; if you are wondering about the AI in it’s name, think of it as a wee Copilot device.
